This cover scene was painted by Rowena Morrill based upon Esteban Maroto’s Pellucidar drawing of the sacrifice of a girl to a mahar for a proposed Ace Books illustrated edition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ At the Earth’s Core. When that Ace Books project ultimately fell through, the publishers commissioned Offutt to write a novel around the Maroto illustrations. The end result was the novel King Dragon.

This particular image gained notoriety when The New York Daily News reported that Saddam Hussein had the work hanging in a secluded townhouse during his fall in Baghdad — but that particular painting turned out to be a mere copy.

And with that, we mark 13,000 posts here at Pulp Covers. Thank you for visiting!